These are probably newbie questions, but I haven't been able to find good answers in my searching of the forums, so here goes -

1. Is it better to capture in the resolution that you plan on using for the final encode, or the maximum resolution that your equipment can handle?

2. If you capture in the resolution of the final encode, do you need to use gripcrop() in the filter script?

3. If you do need to use gripcrop(), what are the proper parameters for taking a 544x480 capture to a 544x480 encode? 480x480 to 480x480? (Every time I try this, I end up with very large bars on the left and right, which end up on the screen during playback).

Original source for all of this is NTSC television captured with a bt878 based card using vitualVCR and Huffy codec.

Final destination is KVCDx3 template.

Thanks for any help. So far this site has been a wealth of excellent information.

One other question. Most of the material I am recording is made for television (in the US). It appears that it has all originated on video, not film. Should this be kept at the 29.97 frame rate or moved to the 23.97 rate of NTSC film? And should I bother to deinterlace it?

Thanks again.

Capture the highest you can. No. But you should
And take advantage of blocks-TV overscan, so you actually encode a smaller film pixel area (resized) so when it's stretched back on the TV, you don't loose picture area. Take a look at MovieStacker. MovieStacker will take care of the correct resize and aspect. Thanks

-kwag

If the original is 29.97fps (Not telecined), you must encode at 29.97fps.
If your target is MPEG-2, you don't need to deinterlace. If it's MPEG-1, then you must deinterlace.

-kwag